Beck leaving Fox: It's not the end of the world

Star-Ledger File PhotoPolitical commentator Glenn Beck's show on Fox News will end this year ... but the world probably won't.

Here’s one of the things we never understood about Glenn Beck (and there are many): If he really believed the world was coming to an end tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, why was he banking any of the $32 million a year he was earning? Did Nostradamus have a 401(k)?

And why was Beck insisting his viewers buy gold (from companies paying him to hawk it, of course) and stockpile it? Are they supposed to line their coffins like Egyptian kings? Is the heavenly economy based on the gold standard?

Every day, seemingly, Beck had another reason for doomsday: an all-out war in the streets between the feds and militias, an economic crisis of epic proportions, a nuclear disaster. You wonder how he slept — even after checking under his bed for monsters.

What was next, the Founding Fathers rising from their graves like angry zombies in three-cornered hats, smiting unpatriotic liberals of big government?

Beck, the most famous naysayer since Henny Penny, has been booted off Fox News because, well, companies don’t want to advertise on a show that insists the end is coming. After all, Geico wants you to insure that car for at least a year. Beck’s insurance company, we guess, sends him the annual calendar one month at a time.

Beck’s show will end sometime this year. (Presumably before the world does.) No date has been given.

“I took the job two years ago because I thought I had something important to share,” Beck told his viewers. “I really thought that if I could prove my case that something wicked this way was coming, something in America was wrong, America would listen. And they have.”

America listened? Hardly. The teeny Beck Cult listened. Reasonable people switched the TV off when he called the president a racist.

Some solace for those who might miss his TV show: He’ll still be on radio and the internet, write books and give speeches.